Colour as Culture: Colour Implications in Selected Kurdish and African-American Poems: A Comparative Study

Abstract

As a phenomenon, colour is influential in human’s feelings, emotions, reactions, and even physical and mental products and outputs. Yet, its implications are bound by some social, mythical, historical, religious, political, psychological, and cultural perspectives. They also could be related to cultural pluralism and melting-pot theories on the one hand and multiculturalism and cross-culturalism on the other hand, since culture functions as a collective arena for different perspectives in any given society. The present descriptive study tries to illustrate the impact of different cultures and social make-ups upon the varying implications of the same colour in different poems from two different cultures that, despite their differences, may share some similar social, political, and cultural backgrounds. It tries to find answers for questions like: Can the similar social and political status of certain people be reflected in similar use of certain colours? Do such people or nations have similar psychological and cultural responses to the same colours and why?  It hypothesizes that differences in norms and traditions bring about interesting and contradictory results from colour connotations in the chosen poetic texts. Searching a number of intellectual and up-to-date sources and practicing the collected and comprehended concepts in some English and Kurdish texts through a descriptive and analytical approach, the study reached some conclusions that are summed up at the end of the paper along with the list of the works cited.